John Henry Days (18 page)

It’s best to close the window now. We are approaching the Big Bend Tunnel and the air is not the best. The fumes accumulate, you understand. It took us almost three years to blast through it. We could have gone around,
but that would have added precious time to the journey, and time is everything. Arduous work, of course, but with the new steam drills, the work of excavation is much more rapid and efficient. God made the mountains and man made the steam drill. True mechanical marvels, sir. If you ever have the occasion to see one of these machines, you will not be disappointed. But we should close the windows now, I can see it up ahead.

J
unketeer lore holds that when One Eye lost his eye, he gained sight into other spectra. Blinded by the irony of the times, he could peer into realms denied the average man, where cause and effect have no sway, logic no authority, where the only laws are the dim edicts of the supernatural. Alas, One Eye demonstrates no useful feats of prognostication. He declines to say sooth. He cannot foresee the weekend box office tally or channel the
Publishers Weekly
best-seller list. When chance places him before a sitcom, it is not within his power to perceive which actor will tumble into boozy tailspin and tell all, or determine who is fated to hawk baubles in a brightly colored in-fomercial, who will follow James Dean around Dead Man’s Curve. He does none of these things and does not pretend to. But when it comes to one-eyed men with eye patches, you project, J. thinks. You want magic these days. Conjure women and oracular witches stirring lizards in cauldrons don’t just fall off trees, so you take them where you can get them.

“I didn’t mean to break up your interlude,” One Eye says, tilting his head toward Pamela.

“Just talking,” J. answers. “I had to get a soda for my throat.”

“How is it?”

“Raw.” His throat shivers with a tremulous pain. After—after the commotion, after the application of Mr. Heimlich’s Maneuver, the subsequent launch of the pernicious plug of beef from esophageal berth and the tracking of its salival contrail across the Social Room—a man introduced himself as a doctor. The local general practitioner, another railroad son, this one equipped with wire-rim spectacles and pockmarked crimson cheeks. J. forgets his name, but why not Dr. Willoughby? Dr. Willoughby was kind and knew the town’s secret scars, thumbs hooked codgerly into his green suspenders. Suitable enough. Doc Willoughby told him he might want to check in with the hospital. After serious choking incidents, he said, the trauma to the throat tissues can sometimes induce them to swell up hours later, impeding the
breathing passage. A post-choking choking. Better to be safe than sorry, he said. J. declined of course.

“Why didn’t you say something sooner to let us know what was happening?” One Eye asks, at once angry and apologetic.

“I was trying. You didn’t see.”

“I didn’t know you were choking. You looked so peaceful at first, I thought you were sneaking a fart, to tell you the truth.”

“Someone saw, thank God.”

“He’s a stamp collector?”

“He collects railroad stamps.”

“Christ.”

“You’re telling me.” J. looks down at his soda and wipes away a wash of condensation. I’m glad the stamp collector was there, he tells himself.

One Eye stiffens, and the expression he had in the van and the Millhouse returns to his face. “It was a sign, J.”

“A sign I should chew thoroughly before swallowing.” J. isn’t sure he is ready for a conversation right now. He wants to crawl into his musty sheets and stare at the water stains on his ceiling until they align themselves into pools of sleep he might dip in.

“You can look at it that way if you want.”

“There something you want to talk about, One Eye? I should get some sleep.”

One Eye motions him into his room. J. glances back down the walkway to where Pamela had been sitting, but she’s disappeared. He sits down in the lime green vinyl seat by the desk and places his hands on his knees. “Not hanging out with Dave and the guys?” Custom calls for a night cap or three in someone’s room on gigs like this, bullshitting against the darkness. J. has a legitimate excuse, a near-death experience being a perfectly legit excuse, but what is One Eye doing hanging out solo in his room. He isn’t usually the sullen one.

One Eye deflects a spray of papers from his bed and sits down. “What I told you earlier about the List,” he says, his one eye blank and deep in the mesmer routine he likes to use from time to time. For effect. This time he’s cranked it up a notch to piercing. “I wasn’t joking.”

“You plan to take yourself off it,” scoffing, “might as well appeal to the pope for special dispensation.”

“I’m serious. I know who controls it. It’s Lucien.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for months. At first I thought it was a consortium. We talked about that, remember?” One Eye brings up his investigation from time to time, over plastic plates in vintage ballrooms and on couches along the walls of blood-red downtown lounges. He shares his suspicions about the architects of the List: are they a consortium of publicity firms or solitary and mean-spirited visionaries? J. thinks it is a game. Something to pass the time during the many dull moments at events. When One Eye abandoned the idea of a consortium on the grounds that the List possessed an aesthetic purity and a malicious logic that could never be achieved by committee, J. nodded his head and nibbled chicken saté off a skewer. Might as well be discussing puffs of smoke above the grassy knoll. And when One Eye decided that the likely suspects were Lucien Joyce Associates and Patricia Klein Public Relations, J. agreed and continued to nuzzle the bottom of his beer. It is talk to kill time. No one really cares. Do people wonder how televisions, VCRs and computers work, or do they care merely that they work, that they are good, that good folk in lab coats have fashioned devices to round our misshapen hours. The List keeps them working and that is the important thing. J. says he remembers their many conversations on the topic.

“It’s not PKR,” One Eye says, leaning forward in a posture that might have been described as earnest if one did not know him.

“You finally decided on Lucien.” Half of half a yawn executed just then.

“Patricia Klein didn’t feel right,” One Eye continues, trying to ignore J.’s slack expression. “They’re too specialized. They have big-name clients, but they’re not diversified enough. And I doubt Patricia has the cunning, to tell you the truth, for this kind of system. I had pretty much decided it was Lucien when I talked to Chester.” One Eye almost shaking; he needs to tell someone: this is big stuff. “I cornered Chester at an animal rights benefit in Beverly Hills. I figured it was time to interrogate him. It wasn’t a List event, I didn’t see any junketeers or the usual flacks around and Chester had been out two years. This was last month. He was circling the room, pressing the flesh, and I cornered him. He was glad to see me.”

“Good old Chester,” J. nods. “He knew how to liven up things.”

“He’s not dead.”

“You don’t see him at events. Same thing.”

“Yeah. It was like old times. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure Chester is happy out there in Hollywood. They have a different style and Chester is a little too …”

“New York.”

“Right, for them. Anyhow, I got him drunk and got it out of him. The lowdown. It took three martinis and a lot of the old One Eye stare, but I got it out of him eventually.”

“So spill it.” J. checks the time on the bedside digital clock. More common than Gideons in hotel rooms nowadays.

“It’s Lucien,” One Eye says. “It’s been him all along. He knew the game before he even started his own agency, from when he was a party promoter in the disco days. He knew the game from the street. He knew all the players from when he was just a wannabe dropping invites on tables in clubs. He had a perspective. Chester says he let him in on the List after he’d been with LJA a few years. Calls him into his office with this big production about earning trust and shows him the List. Then it became Chester’s job to do the routine maintenance, you know, addresses and contact numbers. Lucien still chose the names, but Chester kept it running smoothly.”

“Until he quit. Was he fired or did he quit?”

“He quit. He wanted to go to Hollywood. Go Hollywood. And Lucien didn’t take too well to that. He’s very protective of his boys and doesn’t like to see them leave the nest and get out from under his thumb. A few months ago for no reason—according to Chester—Lucien cut him off the List. He still liked to go to L.A. events for old times’ sake. They haven’t spoken since.”

“Mommy didn’t like it that he was running around with loose Hollywood starlets. So Chester talked.”

“Chester talked and here we are today.”

J. thinks about his throat. Is it swelling up? One Eye’s revelation is interesting in the abstract, but J. doesn’t have it in him to dwell on it. He is too enervated and wrung. “You could always not go,” J. says. “No one’s forcing you to these things.”

One Eye clucks his teeth. “You’re going for the record and telling me this.” J. doesn’t say anything. “It’s not about willpower. It’s beyond willpower. Deleting my name has a symbolic power that will sustain my decision.”

“They’ll just put you back on. They’ll notice and put you back on.”

“I’ll start with this one thing.”

J. stands to go. This can wait until the morning, after he suffocates on his own throat. In the raw minutes following the stamp collector’s rescue, Tiny retrieved the plug of beef and asked him, “You going to eat this?” Maybe he should have kept it as a souvenir. Get it bronzed. Don’t soldiers save as souvenirs the bullets and shrapnel cut from their flesh? Soldiers’ kids play with them. “And how do you intend to accomplish this Houdini bit?” J. asks.

“First, we break into Lawrence’s room.”

“What?”

“To see if he has the List. We’ll hit his copy, and then we’ll hit Lucien’s.”

“I’ll be in jail and you’ll get off scot-free,” J. says, backing away. “White people can get away with that, not black people. Not down here. We get caught, if they don’t string me up, I’ll get railroaded for sassing the judge or something. You’re laughing but I’m not joking. I’ll be laying asphalt with the work gang.”

“This isn’t Mississippi in the fifties, J.,” One Eye says, cocking his head.

“It’s always Mississippi in the fifties,” J. answers. “Go ahead.”

“I’ve checked it all out. Lawrence is leaving at noon to pick up Lucien in Charleston. Lay out the master’s slippers and pipe. Forty-five minutes there, forty-five minutes back, that’s more than enough time to get into his copy of the List. Lucien doesn’t trust anyone except his assistant, so they bring it wherever they go on their hard drives. Email and fax it from their laptops.”

“There’s no other copy in Lucien’s super-secret safe deposit box?”

“Chester says Lucien keeps a backup in his office, but he writes over it from his laptop copy. Any changes we make will be put on the backup copy on Monday.”

J. shakes his head. He likes the man, but Chester isn’t the easiest person to trust, not with that penciled-in mustache of his. But then, J. remembers, Chester shaved off or erased the wisp because it didn’t fly in Los Angeles. So maybe that was something. “How do we get into his room?”

“I like that, J. That means you’re working it out in that gifted brain of yours. You’re coming around.”

“You haven’t answered me.”

“When you needed that receipt to cover that party you threw in your room at Game Expo Ninety-five, who did you come to?”

“You.” One Eye had purchased receipt-forging gear at a restaurant supply store and helped out his amigos when circumstances demanded some expense sheet finagling, for a 10 percent fee.

“When you needed a copy of Nexis software and a password for some last-minute research, who did you call?” Given to One Eye by an intern he deflowered in a janitor’s closet at the
Washington Post
a few summers back.

“I get the point.”

“Think about it. Wouldn’t it be great to fuck Lucien up? It’s his baby. You know he gets off on it. Making the monkeys dance. Pulling the strings.”

“From hell’s heart, I stab at ya, baby.”

“Maybe.”

“You want to spend more time with your little girl,” J. opines. “Watch her grow. You’ve been away too long.”

“I don’t have a little girl.”

“I know, but it’s something you could say to explain this business.”

“This is no life for a grown-up.”

J. gulps, thinking once again of the doctor’s warning. He finds himself gulping forcefully since his beef misadventure to test the swelling or not swelling of his throat tissues, dispatching inverse trial balloons to test the weather of pain down there. The can of ginger ale, quaffed at selected intervals, will help in his experiment. It didn’t get better or worse in the hours after the choking; his throat just plain hurts. He sipped water out of plastic motel glasses as thin as physics allowed, water that hinted at sulfur. Who knows what swamp the pipes were connected to? Dismal Swamp. He decided to switch up to ginger ale. “You’d like me to believe there are high stakes involved. But it’s just a game. What made you come to this,” J. asks, “after all this time?”

“I already lost one eye. One eye—what’s next? I’ll open a press release, get a paper cut that gets infected and I’ll die because antibiotics don’t work anymore. I’ll get botulism from some spoiled peas at a buffet. Or I could choke to death on pigs-in-a-blanket, eh? Plus I want to show them I can do it.”

“Proving what?”

“At the very least it’ll be a fun prank. A spy mission. What do you say?” One Eye’s one eye winks.

“Let me think about it.”

“That’s a halfway yes. I knew you had the spark, J. Ever since I saw you snag that bottle of Stoli and put it under your coat at that Random House fete.”

“Good night, One Eye.”

“So you’re in?”

“I’ll have to talk to you in the morning, One Eye. Let me get my shit together and I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

A
lphonse Miggs lies on his bed half-naked, contemplating the fissures of a mothball. His striped boxer shorts almost reach his knees, the tops of his socks almost reach his knees, out of his T-shirt extrude soft fishbelly arms. He hasn’t removed his shoes yet. Lying on the bed with his shoes on is something he would never do at home, not even on the pullout sofa in the basement where he sleeps these days, and is a luxury. He is in room 12 of the Talcott Motor Lodge, in a museum of previous guests’ scratches and gouges, grateful to have a place to call his own.